Salesforce suffers major outage

Glitch gave employees the ability to read and write across company data.

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(Image credit: Image Credit: Gil C / Shutterstock)

Salesforce has suffered one of the biggest downtimes ever as it was forced to turn off huge parts of its infrastructure.

The outage followed changes the company made to its production environment, which affected its access permission settings, giving employees access to all company files.

By ‘access’, we mean both read and write capabilities, so not only can people steal company data, they can also tamper with it.

The company issued a status update, blaming the issue on "a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended."

It said that the script impacted customers of Salesforce Pardot, which is a B2B, marketing-oriented CRM service, with businesses in North America and Europe affected the most. To stay on the safe side, the company decided to turn off parts of its infrastructure, even those that looked fine at first.

"As a result, customers who were not affected may have also experienced service disruption, including customers using Marketing Cloud integrations," Salesforce said.

Parker Harris, Salesforce CTO and co-founder, apologizsd for his company's issue on Twitter. The media and the general public were quick to make fun of the company, with some even dubbing the company ‘Salesfarce’.